Tag Archives: job interviews

Let’s face it, job interviews are no place for honest people. Answer questions candidly in good faith, and you’re toast. Tell them the diplomatic lies they want to hear, and you’re in like Flynn(“My passion is to help people! I loved my old job, and the only reason I left was that I felt I had reached a point where the position wasn’t conducive to helping me achieve my future goals, etc.”)Well, actually you may not get the job anyway if you don’t look the part or if you give off any kind of off putting vibe at any point in the process.

In any event here are some honest interview answers we’d like to see:

“What makes you want to work for us?”

A: I need a job or I will run out of money. I applied to 20 places, and you were one of the ones who called me back

“I see that you only worked at this place for 4 months. What happened there?”

A: I hated it. The place was like a prison, and you needed to clock out just to take a piss. They also gave me more accounts than anyone could possibly handle.”

“What are you looking for in your next job?”

A:Something that pays all right and where I’m not constantly in fear of being fired for violating some trivial technicality.

“Were you able to consistently hit your quota?”

A: Yes, but only for a while. Then I got burnt out. Then again the quotas were so unrealistic that no one on the entire team was hitting them, except maybe like 1 or 2 people.

“Tell me about a time when “XYZ” happened and how did you handle it?

A: I can’t really think of a specific example, so let me just pull something out of my ass real quick and hope that it sounds like something that could have actually happened.

“What would your colleagues say about you”

A: That I’m sort of creepy cause I tend to hit on girls through the office communicator and on Linkedin, but that I know what the fuck I’m doing, and that’s why everyone still asks me for help.

I’ve been meaning to say this for a while. I hate any job interview question that starts with “tell me about a time when…” It’s just sooo cheesy and often totally irrelevant. I get that they are trying to see how you handle yourself and get you to draw on an experience, but it is just such nonsense. I play along, but I’m just too real for this kind of scripted dollhouse crap. It’s like, I want to say “well that’s happened to me thousands of times, as you can see by looking at my resume I’ve been in this field for over 10 years. I don’t want to pinpoint a specific scenario because well there are too many.” Of course you can’t say that though if you actually want the job, so you just have to make some stupid story up and hope that they move on to something less retarded.

They would be better served to narrow the field by asking questions that actually pertain to the job instead of these canned creamy corn questions that just entice people to make up weird stories. Especially if you have a lot of experience, it’s hard to take that kind of line of questioning seriously, and I will admit I always lose some respect for recruiters and interviewers when their questions degenerate into such assembly line frivolity. On the spot queries like “what would you do in this situation?” are much better. I have worked with enough incompetent people in my day and seen enough high turnover to know that they definitely are not making the most of “having their pick” in a tough economy by conducting interviews in this fashion. I mean, you’d be better off asking if the job candidate knows the difference between words like “you’re” and “your” or “lose and “loose.” Then at least you would find out if they can operate at a third grade level in their daily communications. That should help eliminate 95% of applicants.